Three strophes of runhenda, the rhyming variant of fornyrðislag first used in the "Höfuðlausn" attributed to Egill Skallagrímsson (see Bbk44). Jónas's poem rhymes in couplets; the rhymes are masculine or feminine ad lib., the rhyme-scheme of the original being aaBBCCDD EEffggHH IIJJkkLL (and of the translation aabbCCdd EEffgghh iijjkkll). Each couplet has the alliteration pattern 22.

1847 (A255-6; image) under the title "Brot" ("A Fragment"). The title "At Home" ("Heima") was first used by Matthías Þórðarson in 1929 (1D88-9).

Commentary: "Hulda" is Iceland, of course. The opening lines of the poem, as well as the meter and rhyme scheme, are modelled on the "Höfuðlausn" ("Head Ransom") often attributed to the skáld Egill Skallagrímsson (ca. 910-ca. 990).1 Egill's poem, ostensibly composed during a visit to York in England ca. 937, is believed to be the earliest surviving Icelandic poem to contain end-rhyme.

In Jónas's manuscript of this poem, lines 4-7 of the third stanza originally read: "(who) still believes in God / and in himself, / as I (do) in myself — / much more than the Danes do." He then rewrote the seventh line to read: "there is life in (that) land," and added the eighth line "and a spirit capable of light." The cancelled reading suggests how deep were Jónas's disappointment and resentment, in his last days, about what he interpreted as the Danes' inadequate appreciation of him and his work.

Notes

1 Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson points out that Jónas's lines reflect the way Egill's poem is printed in the Lexicon Poeticum (1860) of Jónas's teacher Sveinbjörn Egilsson, adding that "it is probable that Jónas knew the poem from his teachers at Bessastaðir and their manuscript copies, rather than from printed books" (Bbk45n71).